From the Summer 1982 issue of Film Quarterly. — J.R.
Four Books on the Hollywood Musical
THE HOLLYWOOD MUSICAL, by Clive Hirschhorn. New York: Crown.
HOLLYWOOD MUSICALS, by Ted Sennett. New York: Harry N. Abrams.
THE HOLLYWOOD MUSICAL, by Ethan Mordden. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
GENRE: THE MUSICAL, edited by Rick Altman. London & Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul (BFI Readers in Film Studies).
If the musical has nearly been vanquished as a popular form by the increasing subdivision of its audience into separate classes, age groups, and ethnic interests, these four books on the subject which nostalgically chart its heyday are similarly compartmentalized and exclusive. It seems inevitable that each of these four elegant receptacles for the most libidinal of American movie genres should address a different portion of our psyches: after all, if our society and minds are splintered, why shouldn’t our integral genres be as well?
The glib marketing strategies that aim each book at a somewhat different audience create the odd social effect of four high-rises, each constructed inside a separate ghetto — although the attractive coffee table books of Clive Hirschhorn and Ted Sennett might also be regarded with some justice as adjacent towers on somewhere like Sutton Place. Read more
From the August 29, 1997 Chicago Reader. This is one of the 13 pieces selected and translated into Farsi by Saeed Khamoush for the unauthorized collection of some of my Reader pieces that was published in Iran back in 2001, and the only one in that volume relating to Iranian cinema. — J.R.
Gabbeh
Rating *** A must see
Directed and written by Mohsen Makhmalbaf
With Shaghayegh Djodat, Abbas Sayahi, Hossein Moharami, and Roghieh Moharami.
She’s So Lovely
Rating *** A must see
Directed by Nick Cassavetes
Written by John Cassavetes
With Sean Penn, Robin Wright Penn, John Travolta, Harry Dean Stanton, Debi Mazar, Gena Rowlands, and James Gandolfini.
To put it in simple market terms, Gabbeh packages Iran and She’s So Lovely packages John Cassavetes. Both films succeed admirably in taking on intractable and potentially uncommercial material — at least from the standpoint of mainstream Western audiences — and in making an alluring consumer object out of that encounter. Both take ideological shortcuts to make this alchemy possible, and that limits their artistic and expressive range, though this seems unavoidable given the marketplace barriers they’re bent on overcoming. The problem is in learning how to appreciate them for what they are without losing sight of what they aren’t. Read more
From The Soho News (August 4, 1981), very slightly tweaked on January 27, 2010. –J.R.
The Celluloid Closet:
Homosexuality in the Movies
By Vito Russo
Harper Colophon Books, $7.95
Want to read the first comprehensive study in English of homosexuality in the movies? Go hunt up Parker Tyler’s Screening the Sexes (1972). Prefer a more theoretical and political, less coterie-oriented approach? Try Richard Dyer’s first-rate Gays and Film (1975), which includes Caroline Sheldon on lesbians, Dyer on stereotyping, and Jack Babuscio on camp. Like something even more up to date, dealing with the “textual incoherence” of recent Hollywood movies like Cruising and Looking for Mr. Goodbar from a gay lib perspective? Check out Robin Wood’s interesting and fruitful article (no pun intended) in the current issue of Movie.
Where does this leave Vito Russo’s serious and ambitious The Celluloid Closet — which incidentally bears the same subtitle as Tyler’s book? Not so much in the lurch as the above list may imply. As the best researched and illustrated book on the subject — entertainingly and intelligently written in epigramatic journalese, and clearly backed up by years of patient fact-finding and interviewing — it deserves to be considered a significant reference point and a source of reference in the years to come. Read more
